“Great men have been among us; hands that penn’d
And tongues that utter’d wisdom, better none:
The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington.”
In 1726 Thomas Cooke printed an edition of Marvell’s works which contains the poetry that was in the folio of 1681, and in 1772 Cooke’s edition was reprinted by T. Davies. It was probably Davies’s edition that Charles Lamb, writing to Godwin on Sunday, 14th December 1800, says he “was just going to possess”: a notable addition to Lamb’s library, and an event in the history of the progress of Marvell’s poetical reputation. Captain Thompson’s edition, containing the Horatian Ode and other pieces, followed in 1776. In the great Poetical Collection of the Booksellers (1779-1781) which they improperly[1] called “Johnson’s Poets” (improperly, because the poets were, with four exceptions, the choice not of the biographer but of the booksellers, anxious to retain their imaginary copyright), Marvell has no place. Mr. George Ellis, in his Specimens of the early English poets first published in 1803, printed from Marvell Daphne and Chloe (in part) and Young Love. When Mr. Bowles, that once famous sonneteer, edited Pope in 1806, he, by way of belittling Pope, quoted two lines from Marvell, now well known, but unfamiliar in 1806:—
“And through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle’s shining eye.”
He remarked upon them, “the last circumstance is new, highly poetical, and could only have been described by one who was a real lover of nature and a witness of her beauties in her most solitary retirement.” On this Mark Pattison makes the comment that the lines only prove that Marvell when a boy went bird-nesting (Essays, vol. ii. p. 374), a pursuit denied to Pope by his manifold infirmities. The poet Campbell, in his Specimens (1819), gave an excellent sketch of Marvell’s life, and selected The Bermudas, The Nymph and Fawn, and Young Love. Then came, fresh from talk with Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, with his Select Poets (1825), which contains the Horatian Ode, Bermudas, To his Coy Mistress, The Nymph and Fawn, A Drop of Dew, The Garden, The Gallery, Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow. In this choice we may see the hand of Charles Lamb, as Tennyson’s may be noticed in the selection made in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1863). Dean Trench in his Household Book of English Poetry (1869) gives Eyes and Tears, the Horatian Ode, and A Drop of Dew. In Mr. Ward’s English Poets (1880) Marvell is represented by The Garden, A Drop of Dew, The Bermudas, Young Love, the Horatian Ode, and the Lines on Paradise Lost. Thanks to these later Anthologies and to the quotations from The Garden and Upon Appleton House in the Essays of Elia, Marvell’s fame as a true poet has of recent years become widespread, and is now, whatever vicissitudes it may have endured, well established.
As a satirist in rhyme Marvell has shared the usual and not undeserved fate of almost all satirists of their age and fellow-men. The authors of lines written in heat to give expression to the anger of the hour may well be content if their effusions give the pain or teach the lesson they were intended to give or teach. If you lash the age, you do so presumably for the benefit of the age. It is very hard to transmit even a fierce and genuine indignation from one age to another. Marvell’s satires were too hastily composed, too roughly constructed, too redolent of the occasion, to enter into the kingdom of poetry. To the careful and character-loving reader of history, particularly if he chance to have a feeling for the House of Commons, not merely as an institution, but as a place of resort, Marvell’s satirical poems must always be intensely interesting. They strike me as honest in their main intention, and never very wide of the mark. Hallam says, in his lofty way, “We read with nothing but disgust the satirical poetry of Cleveland, Butler, Oldham, Marvell,” and he adds, “Marvell’s satires are gross and stupid.”[1] Gross they certainly occasionally are, but stupid they never are. Marvell was far too well-informed a politician and too shrewd a man ever to be stupid.
As a satirist Marvell had, if he wanted them, many models of style, but he really needed none, for he just wrote down in rough-and-ready rhyme whatever his head or his spleen suggested to his fancy. Every now and again there is a noble outburst of feeling, and a couplet of great felicity. I confess to taking great pleasure in Marvell’s satires.
As a prose writer Marvell has many merits and one great fault. He has fire and fancy and was the owner and master of a precise vocabulary well fitted to clothe and set forth a well-reasoned and lofty argument. He knew how to be both terse and diffuse, and can compress himself into a line or expand over a paragraph. He has touches of a grave irony as well as of a boisterous humour. He can tell an anecdote and elaborate a parable. Swift, we know, had not only Butler’s Hudibras by heart, but was also (we may be sure) a close student of Marvell’s prose. His great fault is a very common one. He is too long. He forgets how quickly a reader grows tired. He is so interested in the evolutions of his own mind that he forgets his audience. His interest at times seems as if it were going to prove endless. It is the first business of an author to arrest and then to retain the attention of the reader. To do this requires great artifice.
Among the masters of English prose it would be rash to rank Marvell, who was neither a Hooker nor a Taylor. None the less he was the owner of a prose style which some people think the best prose style of all—that of honest men who have something to say.
[229:1] “Indecently” is the doctor’s own expression.
[231:1] See Hallam’s History of Literature, vol. iv. pp. 433, 439.